Terror Lurks in Pennsylvania

The parking garage in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, looked safe enough when David Jenkins pulled downtown on a winter’s day in 2008. Jenkins drove forty minutes from his home in nearby York, Pennsylvania, into this city of about 500,000 people to meet a friend he hadn’t seen in a year. He didn’t know evil would greet him when the sun went down.

Jenkins wound his way through the crowded garage and found a parking spot on the third floor. Then he walked to his friend’s apartment building. “We hung out and played PS2, bullshitted over old times, had a few beers,” Jenkins said. “I left at about 12:30 a.m. and went back to the garage for my car.”

Jenkins walked through the cold, now-deserted garage, climbed into his car and started the engine, letting it warm before he started home. As he leaned down to slip an “old school hip-hop” CD into the stereo, he discovered he wasn’t alone.

“A tapping on my window scared the shit out of me,” he said. Jenkins snapped his head toward the window and saw two people staring at him through the glass. “They seemingly came out of nowhere.”

Jenkins immediately turned up the volume. “I know this sounds stupid, but I thought maybe if these were thugs they’d think when they heard that music that I was hard, or something, and maybe be more apprehensive about mugging me, if that was the intent,” he said.

Instead of anyone threatening, he found two pale boys about twelve years old standing in the cold, staring at him through the glass. One boy was taller than the other, and both were skinny. They looked out of place. “The first thing that struck me as odd was their attire,” Jenkins said. “It was ‘80s clothing, only it looked brand new.”

One boy wore a new Montreal Expos baseball cap with a logo the team used between 1969 and 1991. The Expos haven’t existed since 2004. The Vision Street Wear skater hoodies they wore were popular in the 1980s. “What they were wearing just didn’t seem to fit with the time period,” Jenkins said.

The fear of the boys drawing a gun rushed through Jenkins mind. His door was unlocked. Hoping the boys didn’t notice, he rolled his window down a crack, and simply said, “yeah?”

The shorter boy Jenkins dubbed The Ringleader spoke first. “Excuse me,” he said in a voice much older and mature than what should have come out of that mouth. “We’ve had a slight mishap, and I was hoping you could help us out.”

The request froze Jenkins in his seat. “Those were the exact words too,” he said. “‘Slight mishap.’” Jenkins knew a twelve-year-old boy in a parking garage in Pennsylvania after midnight would have never said that. “I was nervous as hell,” he said.

The boy said their ride left them and they were now stuck in that part of town, and needed a lift home. “It seemed an innocent enough request,” Jenkins said. “But my BS alarm was going off. Something just felt really eerie about the whole thing. I mean two kids that young in a parking garage at that hour? It just wasn’t right.”

The fact the boys were in the garage also frightened Jenkins. He hadn’t seen the boys when he walked to his car, and when he got in suddenly they were there. The Ringleader’s request also made him nervous. “It just seemed shady,” Jenkins said. “I asked where exactly they lived, and that I was heading back to York. That ‘other end’ of Lancaster was in the opposite direction.”

Jenkins told the boys no. The Ringleader didn’t like that. “He said he’d give me gas money, and pulled out his wallet and took out a crisp $20 bill and held it up,” Jenkins said. “It was an old style one. An old style $20 should not be that crisp, looking fresh from the bank.”

As the strangeness of the encounter grew more in Jenkins’ mind, he started to ask questions. “Everything about this just felt very wrong,” he said. “I asked where exactly they lived.”

The Ringleader again said, “on the other side of town.”

“I asked where, specifically, on the other side of town,” Jenkins said. “I wanted the name of the township, the name of the school district, the name of the street. An exact address.”

The Ringleader balked; the other boy began to look nervous. “They couldn’t give me an answer,” Jenkins said. “This really creeped me out because it was now apparent that they really had no intention of getting a ride anywhere. They just wanted to get into my car.”

Then Jenkins saw something that kept him awake for the next two days. “I noticed something else – completely jet black eyes,” he said. The sight terrified him. Jenkins looked away from the children, trying to keep them from seeing the fear on his face.

The second child spoke to him. “Please,” he said. “Can we please get in the car? It’s really cold out here. I’ll tell you where to go once we get in.”

Panic consumed Jenkins.

“Please,” the smaller boy demanded.

“At this point it was fight or flight,” Jenkins said. “And I certainly wasn’t getting out of the car.”

He put the car in gear and told the kids “no” through the crack in the window. “Please, don’t go,” the Ringleader said, desperation creeping into his voice. “We’ll be stuck out here.”

“Sorry,” Jenkins said and started to pull away from these black-eyed children.

The tenor of the Ringleader’s voice changed. “Now, perhaps realizing their fate was sealed, they no longer held back,” Jenkins said. “The talkative shorter one’s voice changed now. No longer like that of a desperate little boy, it had a nasty snarl to it.”

The Ringleader started cursing at Jenkins as the car pulled away from them. Before Jenkins drove onto the ramp down to the lower level, he chanced a look in the rearview mirror. Terror stabbed at him anew, but it had nothing to do with the strange eyes of the boys. His fear came from something more human. “There was no trace of them,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘oh wow, they vanished,’ I was thinking, ‘shit, they’re gonna try to head me off at the next level down.’”

Worried the boys might run in front of his car at every turn, he hurried to the ground floor and shot onto the street. The black-eyed boys weren’t there. Three blocks away, his heart pounding in his chest, he stopped for a red light. “I kept looking back, scanning for them,” Jenkins said, but the strange boys weren’t behind him.

He sat in his car, still shivering from fear; the light stayed red. “It seemed like it was taking an unnaturally long time to change,” he said. “In fact I think now that those intersections are even supposed to be flashing red and yellow lights at that time of night.”

The minutes crawled by, and the light refused to change. Then he saw the black-eyed boys standing on a street corner he’d looked at not ten seconds before. “Sure enough, there they are,” Jenkins said. “I’d been looking around everywhere the entire time and didn’t see them coming. There’s just no way they could’ve gotten right on top of me without me seeing them coming.”

The Ringleader made eye contact with Jenkins and snarled. The second boy looked apprehensive “Even apologetic,” Jenkins said. “Like a good cop/bad cop routine or something.”

The boys started walking toward Jenkins’ car, and the panic again rose in his chest. The light still shown red. “There was nothing coming the other way and I just gunned it through the red light. I was hoping to God there’d be a cop.”

He didn’t encounter one police car on his fear-fueled drive home, running every red stoplight on his way. Once he reached the highway, he began to relax, but nothing went back to normal. “I didn’t sleep for like 48 hours after that, and didn’t sleep without a night light on for quite some time after,” Jenkins said. “When I finally did sleep they were in my dreams. I kept thinking that maybe my mind was just playing tricks on me that night, but after seeing other accounts, there are just too many similarities to write off. These things are very real.”

This tale of black eyed children creeps me out more so than any other since this occured near my neck of the woods in central Pennsylvania. What on earth are these things? Ghosts, demons, other world enities, vampires? Part of me hopes to God I never find out.

C Marie

I’ve read every BEK encounter on this site. They’re the only other worldly entity that I am terrified and fascinated by, others don’t scare me. I haven’t read about BEKs anywhere else but here. Am I imagining it or do they only seem to show up in colder places? I feel like every story talks about how cold it is, or the snow, or not being able to see BEK breath in the cold. What’s that about?

Lyon25

Great article. By far the most detail presented of a convo between black eye kids and a witness. I’d have ran every red light too. Just freaky

I live in York, Pa. and this isn’t the first time I have heard of recent
black eyed children style encounters in this area; in fact it seems
that certain places in the world just attract this weirdness. We have
tales of a big bird or strange winged creature, black dogs, ghosts, and a
whole slew of uncanny and creepy stuff. I used to live in Suncook, NH
and before that in Columbus, OH and similar things crept up with strange
cryptid or ghostly creatures, black eyed children, and even just pure spooky things where-ever I have lived…seems like I am attracted to the paranormal hotspots. :p

http://www.facebook.com/felix.sledge Felix Sledge

So creepy

James Yee

Sorry but it has to be said, “There’s never a cop around when you need one!”

This things freak me out!

http://profiles.google.com/jonathonansley Jonathon Ansley

There are reports of them in Dallas, Texas, Arizona, California, and all over the world. Check out David Weatherly’s book “The Black Eyed Children”

http://twitter.com/Lakewolf585 Lakewolf Whitecrow

It doesn’t surprise me that this happened in Lancaster.

The first settlers here didn’t put “hex signs on their barns for good luck. They knew something evil lived here.

I often wonder if these black eyed individuals and another supernatural being would go rounds. They say they are highly intelligent and fear fueled, I would love to see an article about them taking on an empath. I would love to meet one of these children or adults, for the most part it sounds like their fear is not given but self indulged and the time of night or the lack of people you know the surroundings feed the fears of others. Empaths deal with emotional beings all the time and I would absolutely adore to lend my services to “feel” these folks out. I probably would be a bit more antsy with the adults but as far as children their innocence overlaps my ability to fear. These people are not “creatures” they are humans whether their intent is good or evil is within their hearts not their eyes, yes eyes are the windows of the soul, but just because they are dark and “dead” doesn’t mean their souls are not beautiful. I think the fear of these people is just the hyped up fear of misunderstanding. As per folks trying to convince others that these people are evil, I would like to have one that knows they are one contact me thru the internet, and as precautions state for my own personal feelings I am not inviting them to my house nor to my area, I just want to talk to one and see where their hearts really lie. Feel free to contact me at my facebook or my email account…. Seems that you can find people on your own so I’ll leave you to contacting me on your own. And by the way, I am an empath and a very strong one so I won’t have games nor be slighted by toying with me. I am curious though of these people’s existence and why they have so many fear them when even the dark is beautiful.

Cynthia Culverhouse

I used to date a guy from Springfield, Ohio, we met in upstate NY, we dated back in the seventies, and he had beautiful brown eyes, but when he came to visit November, 2011 (forty years later), when I looked into his eyes, they changed immediately and became black, it scared me, but I acted like I wasn’t afraid, when he got up from where we were sitting, I said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus, I rebuke you”, he seemed shocked. He was going to stay with me for two weeks, I couldn’t stand how creepy he was, and even after meeting him at the bus station,when he first got here, he asked me to invite him in, by saying, ‘Oh C___, you ain’t gonna invite me in”? I looked at him kind of strange seeing how he came up from Texas to visit and stay, and my grandson didn’t think anything at the time but he remembers him asking me to invite him in. And it bugged me so much that I decided to do a search on the internet. And ‘lo and behold I found information. Because his eyes weren’t black when I met him originally and when he first got here that November, I know they can change their eye color, I sent him an email and told him that his eyes were black and that he must have sold his soul to the devil, he told me I need to stop smoking that stuff, well I never smoked anything in my life that would make me see what I saw then.

JiggyPotamus

I was extremely skeptical regarding this topic when I first encountered it maybe a year or so ago, but having done more research, I think there likely is something going on here. I have always been skeptical of any paranormal claims, anything strange, but there are a few phenomena that I have been convinced actually exist. Despite all of the reports, I am still on the fence regarding extraterrestrials, and I really hate attempting to form an opinion tbh. I had a sasquatch encounter not too long ago, and am 100% positive these are simply animals that have remained undiscovered.

The other thing I am convinced of is the existence of “ghosts,” or other entities. I know there are negative beings out there that are not human, and I think this is the most likely explanation for BEK’s. Their entire nature simply emanates negativity. Remember though, even extremely evil and negative entities can appear or act in a way that comes across as positive, as they are attempting to either find an “in,” gain trust, etc. This is a common occurrence among entities of this sort, and it seems to be what is going on with BEK’s as well.

If they simply “appeared” on the scene in recent years or the last decade, a possible explanation may be that it is a new tactic by evil entities of some sort. I know how this sounds, and how paranormal things in general sound to many people, but ignorance of the fact does not change reality, unfortunately. I am replying to your post directly simply because I believe you are mistaken in saying these are definitely humans. If they were truly humans that have been “possessed” by a negative entity emotionally or physically speaking, this would not account for their ability to seemingly appear or disappear at will. Humans, even possessed ones, are still bound by the physical laws of our plane of existence.

It does seem that there are laws and energy forms that are not understood or have yet to be discovered, or maybe even loopholes in our reality, but for the most part it seems that any physical human is not able to “physically” perform such appearing and disappearing actions. Part of what most people fail to realize is just how much of our reality is subjective and within the mind. Science, although it has somewhat acknowledged this fact, truly fails to grasp the consequences to any significant degree.

But I digress, as this has little to do with the topic at hand. Anyway, while you may be what you term an “empath,” which I think I understand what you mean, I think you are a bit overconfident in your prediction regarding how you would react to such beings. Not to put you down or anything though. WHENEVER dealing with ANYTHING of a paranormal nature, it is ALWAYS imperative to maintain control over your emotions, ESPECIALLY your fear response. Fear is an emotion, sure, but it is a PHYSICAL response, based on chemical reactions, biologicallly designed to keep us alive basically. But, like with most things, one can alter their fear response by creating their own reality, in a manner of speaking. Mind of matter is sort of what I am saying. It is a true phenomena, and it is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the part of our realities and brains that science has yet to understand…Just like they don’t understand bigfoot is an actual, physical animal, lol. THAT is my true passion when it comes to this type of subject matter.

Roberta Precious-Robocop Marti

Then I must question your idea on what human is. These “beings” as you call them might not be possessed by evil they might just be misunderstood because of the “fear” their appearance gives off. People are more likely to try to disassociate other beings from being human because “this is not how a human looks”. How do you know maybe they just have really dark eyes and that’s just a genetical defect. Who’s to say what is or isn’t in these kind of people’s hearts. “I was terrified” ….. because you didn’t know about them. Most fear the unknown. As for ghosties and other entities they do exist. Angels exist as well as evil entities, however, in agreement with the sasquatch thing, big animal no one has yet ran into ….could be an explanation for that. As quick as you are to say that bigfoot exists and isn’t a horrible creature, how do you know? You can’t just assume these people are evil no matter how they look. That’s being more than wrong that’s just being closed minded. That’s why I would love to have one of them or more than one of them contact me via facebook and I would like to know for myself what kind of people they are. And they are people. As human as you and me….. their eyes may be different but so are oriental eyes and native american eyes. I believe the evil is either in their hearts or not. I can’t believe that children are evil even if they are dark eyed people. As I’ve said before I don’t believe that evil can overcome good and that’s why I fear nothing. If you do know any of these type of people please tell them to come and talk to me on facebook….. I love interesting people and these people seem to be very interesting and very misunderstood because of their differences.

Roberta Precious-Robocop Marti

Even so, I would think that they aren’t evil just a little strange. I can understand tho where you are coming from, but just because they get angry it doesn’t mean that they are evil…. just have a lack of respect and need some guidance.